First Weekly Quiz: September 16-21, 2013

Below are the 20 questions comprising the First Weekly Quiz. For those who wish to download the questions, a word document is also attached below. Just click on it and the Quiz will be downloaded.

Complete your answers and return them (or the Word document with the answers) to buttons@johnhwatsonsociety.com by 12 Noon, Saturday, 21 September 2013.

Members and non-members may compete. The first person to submit with the highest number of correct answers will be the weekly Quiz Master and will be eligible to compete in the Monthly Quiz. Winners of the Monthly Quiz may compete in the Quarterly Quiz and, if they go forward, in the Annual Quiz.

Weekly Quiz: September 16-21, 2013

Answer and identify the story or book where the answer is found. Success will go to those Members who submit their answers first via email and with the greatest number of correct answers.

This week’s quiz theme is “Text of the Canon.” The only reference material or source required is the Canon itself, and knowledge thereof.

Questions:

What is a “ward” and where is it found in the Canon?

Who is “close as wax?”

An elder son who is humoured.

Pity and sympathy naturally turn to love by whom?

What is Dr Watson’s self-prescribed alterative?

Who sent a farm lad for the doctor?

Who was returning at 4:00 am from a jollification?

A train arrives where at 11:30?

Based on written evidence, what happened between 20 May and 3 June?

Who draws 450£ per annum?

Whose house dates from (c) 1683?

Who preserves?

The three-forty return train is in what story?

At half past five, at what address did a cab deposit Holmes and one other?

A funny story: while I was CTRL-F’ing around on my computer version of the canon for “ward”, I noticed that the little “I am a mind reader” show Holmes does for Watson with regard to the portrait of Henry Ward Beecher and the train of thought to “a most preposterous way of settling a dispute,” comes up not once but twice, in two separate stories: The Cardboard Box and The Resident Patient. Check up on this for me to see that I am not hallucinating. Oh, Watson, you story-recycler you.

You are not hallucinating . . . the phrase does, indeed, appear in both stories. Both are spoken by Holmes to Watson. The only difference is the word “very” is used in RESI and “most” in CARD to modify “preposterous.”

Do we believe this is intentional by Dr Watson, or is it possibly an echo, or could it be an early version of “cut and paste?”

The whole anecdote is repeated! I think this is a case of Watson’s disregard for former publications, in that he didn’t check to see if he’d told that story already, but by God he remembered how amazing it seemed at the time.